Aaron Francis

Ian and Aaron discuss all things related to AI, Ian's new thing he built, a Rails course, and more. Sponsored by LaraJobs & Screencasting.com. Interested in sponsoring Mostly Technical? Head to https://sponsor.mostlytechnical.com to learn more. 00:00 Sleep Talk 03:40 Ian Built Something 16:57 Let's Talk AI 45:06 There's A New Superman?! 51:45 Aaron's Going To Amsterdam 56:51 Rails Course!

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Transcript

Aaron

00:00:00 – 00:00:02

Hello? Good morning. How are you doing?

Ian

00:00:02 – 00:00:06

I'm I'm barely hanging on. Yeah. What's going on? Barely hanging on for you.

Aaron

00:00:06 – 00:00:12

No facade. There's no we're we're we're doing alright. You're barely hanging on. What's the deal?

Ian

00:00:12 – 00:00:19

On. No. Just nothing crazy. Just I had insomnia last night, which is, like, never have insomnia. But a month or two ago, I had it.

Ian

00:00:19 – 00:00:25

Last night, I had it. So I'm just beat. I'm just beat. The one I've been sleeping great too. Great.

Ian

00:00:25 – 00:00:31

I got the sleep pad thing going. It's tracking. It's giving me I'm getting the 90. Right? I'm like, duh, it's awesome.

Ian

00:00:32 – 00:00:34

Man. Then last night, I could not fall asleep.

Aaron

00:00:34 – 00:00:37

You just, like do you just stay in bed all night?

Ian

00:00:37 – 00:00:46

I've I've just did the stay in bed all night roller rink thing. Yeah. Yeah. Brutal. It's not you're not supposed to do that.

Ian

00:00:46 – 00:01:00

You're supposed to get out of bed, go do something. Because my wife has, like, bad insomnia. Not not the can't fall asleep kind, but the fall asleep and then wake up at, like, 03:30 and then just be awake kind. And so Mhmm. Yeah.

Ian

00:01:00 – 00:01:09

You're supposed to get out of bed and whatever. Because obviously, once you've laid there for an hour, like, you're not going to sleep in your time soon. So yeah. But I didn't. I just suffered through, and then at, like, whatever.

Ian

00:01:09 – 00:01:14

I don't even know five in the morning or something, fell asleep for an hour and a half or whatever.

Aaron

00:01:14 – 00:01:15

Yeah. Miserable.

Ian

00:01:16 – 00:01:21

So well, but I have all the good sleep leading up to this, so I'm like, alright. This is gonna get

Aaron

00:01:21 – 00:01:22

me to your bank.

Ian

00:01:22 – 00:01:28

Yeah. I bank some sleep. At first, I was like, I don't know if I can record the pod. Then I took a shower. I was like, you know what?

Ian

00:01:28 – 00:01:30

I got the bank sleep. I got a shower.

Aaron

00:01:32 – 00:01:37

I can go turnaround. Yeah. I got the mess I woke up to the message, can't do it. Sent you back. That's alright.

Aaron

00:01:37 – 00:01:40

Big guy. Got hit with that. Let's do it. I took a shower.

Ian

00:01:41 – 00:01:50

Yeah. Exactly. I was just about to write you back too, and then you had just written me, and I was like, oh, I wanna get in before you saw it. But then, yep, I was like, take a shower. I'm ready.

Ian

00:01:50 – 00:01:56

Let's get on the mics. Otherwise, also but, you know, I'm just gonna be miserable and tired anyway. I might as well be miserable and tired with you.

Aaron

00:01:56 – 00:01:58

That's right. That's kinda the whole that's

Ian

00:01:58 – 00:01:59

the whole thing.

Aaron

00:01:59 – 00:02:00

That's what we're doing here.

Ian

00:02:00 – 00:02:03

Come on. It's perfect. Content. Yeah. Exactly.

Aaron

00:02:04 – 00:02:08

And you're no caffeine guy, so you're just, like, you're just raw dogging life, man.

Ian

00:02:08 – 00:02:13

No. The the caffeine will use to give me the bad sleep, so can't go back to the caffeine. That's

Aaron

00:02:13 – 00:02:14

Love the caffeine.

Ian

00:02:14 – 00:02:22

Last resort. I was, I actually purchased some caffeine based on the recommendation.

Aaron

00:02:22 – 00:02:27

That's not that's not exactly how you're supposed to use it, but that's a good start. That's

Ian

00:02:27 – 00:02:33

a good one. Start. Caleb Porzio did a podcast about tea now Mhmm. Months ago.

Aaron

00:02:33 – 00:02:35

Thirty minute podcast about tea.

Ian

00:02:35 – 00:02:39

Everything you could ever wanna know about how to properly eat tea.

Aaron

00:02:39 – 00:02:47

Yeah. Caleb, I love your shows, but when you talk about tea for thirty minutes or picking boogers, I usually skip I skip those episodes. Just FYI.

Ian

00:02:47 – 00:02:58

I I didn't skip it, but I had it queued up forever because I I it was, like, too intimidating. I was, like, thirty minutes on tea, man. That's gonna be intense. You know? So I had to, like, wait for the right moment.

Ian

00:02:58 – 00:03:05

It came. I'd listened. I was like, alright. I'll try some white tea. That's like the lower caffeine and theory, whatever.

Ian

00:03:05 – 00:03:10

So I bought some from his supplier. He's got a guy. I couldn't I didn't

Aaron

00:03:10 – 00:03:13

get that far into the episode. I didn't know he has a guy. That's awesome.

Ian

00:03:13 – 00:03:14

Of course, he's got a guy. Of course, he's got a guy. Of course, he's

Aaron

00:03:14 – 00:03:15

gotta have a guy.

Ian

00:03:16 – 00:03:25

He's got a guy. And, Caleb, if you're listening to this, which you're very busy, probably not. We need more episodes. He's he's way off of episodes. He's buried in that calendar.

Aaron

00:03:25 – 00:03:28

He's buried in the date picker. We lost him to the date picker.

Ian

00:03:28 – 00:03:29

We lost him.

Aaron

00:03:29 – 00:03:30

I know. This

Ian

00:03:30 – 00:03:32

is what's my fear. He's gone. I know.

Aaron

00:03:32 – 00:03:44

He's gone. Speaking this is a professional segue right here. Speaking of Caleb Porzio and Flux, mister Landsman, did you build something?

Ian

00:03:45 – 00:03:46

Build something.

Aaron

00:03:46 – 00:03:52

Built something. Built something. Woo. All these episodes all these episodes claiming you're gonna build something and then

Ian

00:03:52 – 00:03:53

claiming, no. No. No. I don't

Aaron

00:03:53 – 00:04:00

need to build anything. I just need to do my whatever, run my business or whatever. You built something. With flux.

Ian

00:04:00 – 00:04:08

Thing. With flux. Tell me. So what I built was our sponsorship website. Yay.

Ian

00:04:08 – 00:04:09

Yay.

Aaron

00:04:09 – 00:04:13

We've already made more money than indie hackers make in ten years.

Ian

00:04:13 – 00:04:22

There we go. We got some sales flowing in. So if you've been wanting to sponsor the show, let's start with that. If you want wanting to sponsor the show, now is the time. Get in there.

Ian

00:04:22 – 00:04:34

Place an ad. We're gonna have the new format where it's, like, your name and a tagline read. Quote, you're gonna get a whole month of that. The audience is gonna get to know hear your name, know what you do. I think it's gonna be really cool.

Ian

00:04:34 – 00:04:47

I think it's gonna be better than long form ads. I think it's more entertaining. It's gonna be faster for the audience, but entertaining, and it's going to be useful for the companies. I think it's total win win We're on something. That's my theory.

Aaron

00:04:47 – 00:05:03

It is. So first about the sponsorships, then about you freaking just crushing this thing out. Okay. So sponsorships, it's gonna be great. It's gonna be this podcast is brought to you by name, then fifteen twenty second tagline.

Aaron

00:05:03 – 00:05:04

That's it.

Ian

00:05:04 – 00:05:04

Right. I'm not

Aaron

00:05:04 – 00:05:27

And we do that. We when you buy when you buy a slot, you get the whole month. So between, you know, three to five episodes, you know, best effort will do on every week. You get the whole month, and you just get exposed as the audience. You get exposed to these hopefully cool tools, a little bit of a tagline, and then you can go off and and look at it yourself.

Aaron

00:05:28 – 00:05:33

But you're not sitting through a minute and a half about a g one or something. You know?

Ian

00:05:34 – 00:05:45

Well, that's a g one. Yeah. Yeah. Like, if we let's just do an outright, like, Laravel Cloud, the best way to ship and scale Laravel applications. We'll just throw throw that out there, for example.

Ian

00:05:45 – 00:05:46

They got

Aaron

00:05:46 – 00:05:46

a free read.

Ian

00:05:46 – 00:05:47

They got a free read.

Aaron

00:05:47 – 00:05:51

We gotta send an addendum. Adjunct invoice.

Ian

00:05:53 – 00:06:02

But that sort of thing and the thing is, you know, let's be honest. This is a techie audience. People are skipping the long ads. Right? They're hit they know how to do the thirty second skip.

Ian

00:06:02 – 00:06:15

So if it's just nice, clean inside the episode, everybody's gonna hear it. Everybody's gonna like it. Sponsors get value. Listeners get value. We get value.

Aaron

00:06:15 – 00:06:26

We get value. We get value that we can turn into more of those whatever those really expensive kids chips are. That's where all the value goes. You give us money. But answers to Yes.

Aaron

00:06:26 – 00:06:32

I turn it into those bear chips, and my kids eat them. So that's that's the value exchange we're talking about.

Ian

00:06:33 – 00:06:39

Gets us up. It gets us it. When we haven't slept all night, it gets us on the mics. That's what's right to you to the listeners.

Aaron

00:06:40 – 00:06:47

So it's working. We've already got, I think, five slots sold, which is very exciting. Isn't that right?

Ian

00:06:47 – 00:06:57

We got Well, we we turn because the one is just this. We have somebody who's gonna sponsor quite a few months, and they're just we have this. They'll do a little we're helping them with a part of it. But yes. So

Aaron

00:06:57 – 00:06:58

There you go.

Ian

00:06:58 – 00:07:08

Quite quite a few steps. We've quite a few listings already. So and for I think for next month, there's for the first month, which will be February, there's two right now for February. So you can still get oh, there'll be three, I think. Yeah.

Ian

00:07:08 – 00:07:15

I think that guy's doing February. But, yeah. Still some slots. Get in there.

Aaron

00:07:15 – 00:07:16

This is very exciting.

Ian

00:07:16 – 00:07:18

Because it is. It's gonna be so cool.

Aaron

00:07:18 – 00:07:29

I am so happy to see this come to fruition. And, Ian, this was all your idea. What? Am I getting full credit? You're getting full credit.

Aaron

00:07:30 – 00:07:35

I think you had the idea of doing the I don't remember what you called it, but it was like Yeah.

Ian

00:07:35 – 00:07:36

The the AM the AM radio.

Aaron

00:07:36 – 00:07:38

AM radio. That's what it is.

Ian

00:07:38 – 00:07:57

Yeah. All these years, I've listened to Mike and the Mad Dog. I was when I was building the help spot, I listened to Mike and Mad Dog every day, 1PM, and they don't you know, they had full ads too. You know, it's like a radio station, obviously, but, like, they also had these little hits. And, yes, no ESPN ad network or, AM radio guys, I think, also did the same thing.

Ian

00:07:57 – 00:07:58

I think it's a good

Aaron

00:07:58 – 00:08:02

Old old man river coming through with the AM radio references.

Ian

00:08:02 – 00:08:13

Let me tell you. There's a whole world where just knowing about old things and introducing them as if they were new is awesome business ideas. So You're not right. A thing. Also, the cross culture.

Ian

00:08:13 – 00:08:23

I like when people are like, oh, I saw this thing in Japan, and then I just brought it back here. And now it's a business. Used to be a bigger thing back in the day before. Obviously, now we kinda know what Globalism. Business.

Ian

00:08:23 – 00:08:26

Rounded it a little bit, but it's still a thing.

Aaron

00:08:26 – 00:08:41

You know where this you know where this still works? Yeah. This still works if you are a, Rubyist or even a JavaScript fellow and you see something in the Laravel ecosystem. Just copy it.

Ian

00:08:41 – 00:08:45

Yeah. Just copy it and take it to your ecosystem. He's proof

Aaron

00:08:45 – 00:08:48

Taylor's proven that whatever it is works. Just copy it.

Ian

00:08:48 – 00:08:57

Yep. Yeah. He sees I mean, Taylor copied things. He's, you know, talked about that many times or, you know, at least inspired a lot of things from other ecosystems, especially early on. So yeah.

Ian

00:08:57 – 00:09:10

Oh, in open source, definitely see this quite a bit. And the smart projects who aren't trying to reinvent the wheel, just get in there Mhmm. See what works, you know, put your spin on it. But yeah. So that is what I built.

Ian

00:09:10 – 00:09:12

So now it's available.

Aaron

00:09:12 – 00:09:25

Wandered over to Blue Sky for the first time in, you know, a couple of days, and I saw I was tagged in something from Ian saying, well, you can do sponsors now. So what Surprise. Did you get a wild hair? What happened? Where did this come from?

Ian

00:09:26 – 00:09:40

So we were gonna have a consultancy build this, and they went off and started building it. They got busy. They got sidetracked, whatever. Didn't happen. So it's been a couple months, and I was like, you know, I've been wanting to build something with Flux.

Ian

00:09:40 – 00:09:53

I know I could build this in one day. Let me just come in whenever this was last Tuesday or something like that. And I was like, I'm just gonna build this. So I just came in, sat down, did the Laravel knew. There's nothing better than Laravel knew.

Ian

00:09:56 – 00:10:02

And I just love the idea. What what clicked for me too is, like, one day. Like, I always get caught up in, like, a side thing. I turned into a whole business.

Aaron

00:10:02 – 00:10:03

Yep.

Ian

00:10:03 – 00:10:13

And it's just support and all the stuff. Right? And then I'm like, oh, forget One day. I know for sure I can ship the basic version of this in one day. And so yeah.

Ian

00:10:13 – 00:10:28

So that was it. So I was like, you know, it'd be cool. I'll ship something actually in flux even though we started to work with it and, helps a lot a bit, but whatever, that's not gonna ship for a long time. I'm not even doing most of that work, so it's not really me playing with it. So I was like, I can I can just get in, do this?

Ian

00:10:28 – 00:10:35

Did a little chat GPT helper, sent that off. I try I'm trying the pro version, which you had talked about in this episode. We need

Aaron

00:10:35 – 00:10:37

to we need to do a AI segment. Keep going.

Ian

00:10:37 – 00:10:53

Yeah. We can do that. But it's very nice. I definitely like the o one a lot even better for this kind of thing because it's just like you can give it nice instructions like you would give a human, and it goes off and build stuff, and then it comes back with a bunch of files and, like, great. So I let it do that as, like, the starting point, and it didn't get it, honestly.

Ian

00:10:53 – 00:11:05

But, like, it was fine. It was like, I didn't have to build those files. And now I have the core, then I started wiring it all up. Fuck. Obviously, the longest part of making anything work with Stripe, which is a whole disaster.

Ian

00:11:05 – 00:11:05

So, like

Aaron

00:11:05 – 00:11:06

crazy.

Ian

00:11:06 – 00:11:13

That was, like, half the time was not, like, the Laravel app. It was just, can I get this thing to actually connect to Stripe and Half the time,

Aaron

00:11:13 – 00:11:16

it was, like, what screen do I go to in Stripe?

Ian

00:11:16 – 00:11:25

That's literally yes. With 75% of the 50% was Yep. How do I even find the place in here that I need to set up with a couple things that I need to set up? Do I need a

Aaron

00:11:25 – 00:11:26

product or a variant? What is a variant?

Ian

00:11:26 – 00:11:38

There's a product. There's a price. There's a thing called a price, which is separate from a product. It's so bizarre and insane. And then like, I can't even believe how people love this interface.

Ian

00:11:38 – 00:11:43

It's like, it's horrible. Like it's fine. Right? But the it's actually really visibility is terrible.

Aaron

00:11:43 – 00:11:44

But there's ability is awful. Yes.

Ian

00:11:45 – 00:11:56

Just I mean, just basically, like, you wanna go in there and add a team member. It's not even obvious where to do stuff like that. It's like, oh, it's under business, and then you gotta click in there. It's like, why is it that there's, like, five things everybody does. Yep.

Ian

00:11:56 – 00:12:10

Put those five things big in the front and then have other settings with all the other bullshit that, yeah, you you expect to dig for if you want the weird setting. Right? Yep. I'll spend five minutes digging for that. Like, adding a team member, adding your products.

Ian

00:12:10 – 00:12:25

These are things that seem like they should just work, but they they don't work. They don't. So yeah. So that was a huge part of the mission was, like, can I collect the money, reasonably well and whatever, send it back and save in a database? My first SQL lite is my first

Aaron

00:12:25 – 00:12:26

Flux. Alright.

Ian

00:12:26 – 00:12:29

My first SQL lite app, which was cool.

Aaron

00:12:29 – 00:12:30

I didn't

Ian

00:12:30 – 00:12:33

even notice it. I mean, it's just on the disk. Got to know.

Aaron

00:12:33 – 00:12:36

No. Like, is it where's the website hosted?

Ian

00:12:37 – 00:12:40

Oh, it's on, like, just a random Linode server.

Aaron

00:12:41 – 00:12:46

Oh, nice. So is this, I guess, mostly technical.com is hosted by transistor.

Ian

00:12:47 – 00:12:47

Right.

Aaron

00:12:47 – 00:12:55

And so you got a just a new random server probably through forge and put sponsors.mostlytechnical on there.

Ian

00:12:55 – 00:12:59

Yes. I don't have a Laravel Cloud account, so I can't put it on Laravel Cloud yet.

Aaron

00:12:59 – 00:13:02

Oh, man. That's too bad. You should get one. It's awesome. I know.

Ian

00:13:02 – 00:13:21

Yeah. Exactly. So, for now, it's on Linode. Linode is where I have all of our just, like, random servers, and I just try I tend to just do any websites we have just to get their own server. I just get, like, a one gigabyte RAM little server and put it on there and pay the $5

Aaron

00:13:21 – 00:13:21

or whatever.

Ian

00:13:21 – 00:13:42

Yep. So did that, turned on backups so that the SQLite database will live forever in the backups should anything go wrong with the server, which is really cool, like, little advantage of SQLite there. Just a file sitting there and Mhmm. Back it up. And, presumably, I don't think there's any corruption possible aside from, like, obviously, simultaneous, whatever, blah, blah, blah, which we're not gonna have any problems with.

Ian

00:13:42 – 00:13:53

Yeah. You should still be good. Yeah. That all worked really smooth. It is a little weird how, like, feeling like accessing and looking in the database is weird, but I think it's a little weird, isn't it?

Ian

00:13:53 – 00:13:59

Yeah. But I think it's kinda weird how you do it. I haven't even bothered to set it up. So I do a testing in there. I wanna delete, which is just sitting there.

Ian

00:13:59 – 00:14:05

But Yeah. Yeah. No. It was great. It was, like, so much fun, especially to just ship an app in a day.

Ian

00:14:05 – 00:14:12

I I never I don't think I've ever shipped an app in a day. So that was my first app in a day.

Aaron

00:14:12 – 00:14:15

A lot of firsts on this one. It's really good.

Ian

00:14:15 – 00:14:16

So, LiveWire

Aaron

00:14:16 – 00:14:22

so Laravel, LiveWire, Flux Yep. Linode, Stripe SQLite. SQLite. Laravel. Cloudflare.

Ian

00:14:23 – 00:14:25

Tailwind. Cloudflare.

Aaron

00:14:25 – 00:14:27

Cloudflare that runs the DNS, of course. Yep.

Ian

00:14:27 – 00:14:35

Talking about a bag. I don't have it. I turned off the Protection system. Yeah. Just, like, just doing DNS.

Ian

00:14:35 – 00:14:39

So I was like, yeah. Right? It doesn't need caching. It's gonna be, like, 10 people on this site. Like, it's fun.

Aaron

00:14:39 – 00:14:43

Well, this is this is very impressive. Good for you.

Ian

00:14:43 – 00:14:52

Built us a little page Built in the day. Ads, you know, just to see what's coming up and have it all laid out there so we can do the reads nice and fast and see what's going on.

Aaron

00:14:53 – 00:14:58

If y'all wanna see this, go to sponsor.mostlytechnical.com.

Ian

00:14:58 – 00:15:03

Yep. And it's linked on mostlytechnical.com top nav, which is the transistor site. So

Aaron

00:15:03 – 00:15:04

Oh, smart.

Ian

00:15:05 – 00:15:20

Yeah. So we're out there. It's all good. The other thing you get with the sponsors, we forgot to mention the sponsor segment, is that you also get the links in the show notes. So that'll be in there, which I think is actually pretty useful, on multiple fronts.

Ian

00:15:20 – 00:15:27

So you get the link, you get the ad read, and, he sponsored the show and helped out the show, which is we appreciate greatly.

Aaron

00:15:27 – 00:15:28

Mhmm.

Ian

00:15:28 – 00:15:38

But yeah. So it was fun fun to build something that that kicked me off on, like, oh, what else can I build in a day? Like, now I'm like, I should invent other things to ship in a day. Yeah. Now every idea has to be, like, can I ship it in one day?

Aaron

00:15:38 – 00:15:39

Uh-huh. Yep.

Ian

00:15:39 – 00:15:55

Which is an which is a very, like, useful criteria, I think. For somebody doesn't wanna get bet bagged, you know, caught up in a side project that's gonna actually take a lot of time and energy. It's like, oh, if I could do one day, I could take a day and do anything. That's fine. So Yep.

Ian

00:15:55 – 00:15:56

We'll see. Yeah. How many other

Aaron

00:15:56 – 00:16:11

Even if yeah. For everyone, that's probably useful useful criteria. I know it would be for me. Like, what can I get done today Yeah? Versus, like, laying the foundations of a cathedral that will take a hundred years to build, which is what I typically do.

Aaron

00:16:11 – 00:16:17

And it's like, oh, I should do a project. Well, let's spend forever making it perfect. Yeah.

Ian

00:16:17 – 00:16:34

And it's you could do so much now because, like, you get so much out of the box. It's like Yes. Between Laravel and Tailwind and Flux, if you're doing Livewire or even if you're in React, you have all the shots in and whatever. And, like, you just have so much given to you that you can just you have the shell of that. You have, you know, Jetstream and blah blah blah.

Ian

00:16:34 – 00:16:54

So you can really get going quite pretty far on day one and, you know, obviously, within reason. But any of the you know, chat GBT to chunk out some, big, you know, annoying parts for you, all that kind of stuff, boilerplate stuff. So, yeah, it was it was, useful. It was interesting to to do that. So

Aaron

00:16:54 – 00:17:08

So let let's talk AI. Let's talk AI. How are you using or I can go first if you want using AI, and what are your, like, existential thoughts on it? Because I have

Ian

00:17:10 – 00:17:20

Man, existential thoughts is harder. But, yeah. I guess my day in, day out use is, like I mean, I think it's, like I know. There are people who are, like, super dead set against it. Like, I always see Ken Wheeler.

Ian

00:17:20 – 00:17:42

He's like, this is the devil. It's coming for your jobs and, like, whatever, all that stuff. But for me, I'm like, I use it for boilerplate coating stuff. You especially the o one is quite nice for, like I think that's a big big difference to me in using the o one because it's like, I like that I could just tell it something like I would tell a human and actually get reasonable results. Yep.

Ian

00:17:42 – 00:17:56

Which you could do the with the other ones, but it's like you have you have to do the step it through the process. Like, okay. I get one prompt, then I get another prompt, then I get another prompt, and you have to, like, copy paste things or whatever you're doing or talk to it in the chat, but it's still like you doing that. Let it let it do the reasoning. Good.

Ian

00:17:56 – 00:18:10

So that's good. So, yeah, coding, tests, some writing stuff. I think that the writing stuff is still it's like you gotta dial it in a little bit. I don't know if I can it's good for a cert up to a certain point in writing, but then I feel like you do have to, like

Aaron

00:18:11 – 00:18:12

It's still a little sterile.

Ian

00:18:12 – 00:18:34

Yeah. There's something a little bit off with it, so I don't think I can't use it, like, oh, just write this whole page and, like Right. I don't feel like it does a perfect job with that. Yeah. Although I haven't played too much with, like, the GPTs you can build and stuff where you can load up maybe some examples or do some more stuff with that, to more thoroughly train it, so to speak, which I probably should do.

Ian

00:18:34 – 00:18:52

But, yeah, I mean and then, like yeah. You know, obviously, like, you're around the house, home use kind of stuff, medical issue kind of stuff. Who doesn't love, Googling their medical issues? Now you can ask chat GBT. So that's use, you know, actually been more useful certainly than googling anyway for me.

Ian

00:18:53 – 00:19:08

Yeah. I'd say that's kind of, like, the main thing. I haven't gone too far into the, like, let me use it to talk through an idea Right. And strategize just back and forth with it and things like that. I've I've kept it more sort of meat and potatoes.

Ian

00:19:08 – 00:19:14

I have a task. It does the task. I move on to the next thing. So Yeah. That's true.

Ian

00:19:14 – 00:19:19

Existential next, but how how do you use it day in, day out? Yeah. So that's that's the way that

Aaron

00:19:19 – 00:19:38

I use it day in and day out is I have a task. Let me come to the dedicated window for the tool, like Right. Chad GPT, Claude, whatever, and give it the task. And then I will I will be in charge of, like, putting it back into whatever I'm doing. So I use, I use Claude.

Aaron

00:19:39 – 00:20:08

I use, Chet g p t's o one zero one pro, that whole family of tools. Yep. And I occasionally, but not often, will use Gemini deep research. And so the way that I like to use it, I also use, the only thing I allow in my editor right now, and I've tried a bunch, but the only thing that has stuck that I'm comfortable with is JetBrains' machine learning autocomplete. So I don't even know if they build this as AI.

Aaron

00:20:09 – 00:20:24

I think they build this as, like, hey. This is gonna guess what you're gonna type next, which is kind of AI's thing too. But regardless, it's not like, hey. I'm going to write out a whole algorithm. It's I'm going to be smarter about my autocomplete.

Aaron

00:20:24 – 00:20:40

Right. In my editor, I have tried GitHub Copilot. I've tried I think JetBrains has a proper AI. I've tried Sourcegraph's Cody, and they all just end up after a while becoming too frustrating. It's like, no.

Aaron

00:20:40 – 00:20:50

That's not what I wanted. Get out of my way. Like because then, you you know, you're typing something and you try to hit tab for autocomplete, and it autocompletes the whole algorithm. And you're like, no. It was wrong.

Aaron

00:20:50 – 00:21:12

I just want it. And so there's some of that that's like, I don't want it popping up all the time in my face, and I also don't want it, like, basically, like poisoning the well. I don't want it to tell me what it thinks I should do next because then I'm like, I was gonna do something else. Maybe I should do that. So I've pulled all I've ripped all that out of my editor.

Aaron

00:21:12 – 00:21:27

But what I do is I'll take, you know, especially with, o one pro, I'll take, like, a big, gnarly problem. And I'll Right. You know, I'll spend three to four to five minutes, like, writing something up. Yeah. And then I let it go.

Aaron

00:21:27 – 00:21:56

And it takes with the o one pro, it can take, like, five minutes to come back with an answer. But when it does, it's it's like I just had a mid level to senior developer go off and write down what they think their best implementation is and then come back with examples like, oh, wow. That's really useful. And then I'll take for for other stuff, I'll take, certain files over to Claude and say, like, hey. Here's here's the implementation.

Aaron

00:21:56 – 00:22:21

Here's the test that's failing. I need you to fix this implementation. Mhmm. And right now, I'm doing a lot of, I'm doing a lot of kind of, like, rote programming, but it's also quite technical because it is, it's, like, dealing with abstract syntax trees. Like, I'm taking I'm taking, PHP, running it through, like, a transpiler, like, rewriting it and spitting stuff out on the other side, of course, obviously.

Ian

00:22:21 – 00:22:23

Sure. Obviously. But it's normal.

Aaron

00:22:23 – 00:22:24

There's a there's a lot of

Ian

00:22:25 – 00:22:25

crud up.

Aaron

00:22:25 – 00:22:34

Yes. Exactly. There's a lot of, like, walking the syntax tree recursively until you find this and then walk your way back out. The worst to write. Yeah.

Aaron

00:22:34 – 00:22:43

I don't wanna do that. Like, this is not very valuable. It needs to be done. It is extremely testable because I can say this is the before. This is the after.

Aaron

00:22:43 – 00:22:48

Right. Get there. And it's been great. Mhmm. And so I've had it probably right.

Aaron

00:22:49 – 00:22:56

I've had Claude probably write 10 to 12 of these, like, transformer classes

Ian

00:22:56 – 00:22:56

Mhmm.

Aaron

00:22:56 – 00:23:05

That just take in a piece of code and spit out a piece of code, and it is it saved me days and days of work. It's incredible.

Ian

00:23:05 – 00:23:12

You had a tweet or something where you were like, yeah. You feel like you you were like been four x productivity or something like that along those lines.

Aaron

00:23:12 – 00:23:23

Yeah. Because it's like, I can do something now in five minutes that would have taken me an hour easily. Yep. Easily would have taken me an hour. And I'm doing those things multiple times a day.

Aaron

00:23:23 – 00:23:28

And you add that up and you're like, oh, crap. I just did, like, forty hours of work today.

Ian

00:23:28 – 00:23:28

Right.

Aaron

00:23:28 – 00:23:41

That's crazy. And so I'm I'm totally sold on it. I am 0% sold on I don't know if you saw Chris Sacca talking about, like, programming is dead. We're all screwed. It's over.

Aaron

00:23:41 – 00:23:59

I can just ask this thing to make me an app, and it works. I haven't coded since basic, and so I can and I was even right there, I was like, so you're not really in the game, so you don't really know. And so I still have yet to see, like, if if these people are like, hey, I can just say, you know, Siri, make me an app. Where are all the apps?

Ian

00:24:00 – 00:24:00

Right?

Aaron

00:24:00 – 00:24:15

Like, where are these new inventive things? So I'm not sold on the fact that, you can just give it free rein, but I think I think it would be, a little bit foolish to think this is not going to change the way we work.

Ian

00:24:15 – 00:24:28

Yeah. For sure. Yeah. So, like, I think, well, on the on in my editor, I've I was playing with, like, cursor, but I hate Versus code and all those all the best ones and Versus code and I hate Versus code. Hate it.

Ian

00:24:28 – 00:24:49

So, like, I I I was like, I was holding out. I was like, well, when the Laravel thing plug in extension thing comes, that'll make it better, but it's still it's just not as good as PHPStorm, especially with the Laravel, like, you know, plug in and stuff. So I was like, I need PHP storm. So I'm not gonna be a storm. I was using CoPilot since it, like, came out, which I I think it's gotten worse somehow.

Ian

00:24:49 – 00:25:07

Like, it was better. And then now I feel like Copa tries to do more, kinda like what you say. It's it's doing too much, but I just want it for the code complete to be a little tighter generally in the, like, inline code complete. So right now, I'm trying this podium win they they have this other thing called Windsurfer, which is a Versus code

Aaron

00:25:07 – 00:25:07

for Yeah. That's

Ian

00:25:07 – 00:25:20

what I noticed. Have just a plug in that was the first thing, which is more like Copilot, just their take. I haven't actually had a chance to actually even use it yet. I just installed the other day. Some of the people here are using it.

Ian

00:25:20 – 00:25:38

So I'm gonna try that. But yeah, for my purposes, the inline, I do like having the inline. I don't think I'll get rid of it, but the heavy lifting is outside of the editor, I'd say Mhmm. For the most part. And then, the thing that so I was going back and forth between first of all, I'm paying for 8,000,000 AI things, which I know.

Ian

00:25:38 – 00:25:40

I there's a reckoning coming here.

Aaron

00:25:40 – 00:25:43

It's the new streaming apps. Yeah. They're paying for all of them.

Ian

00:25:44 – 00:25:55

Yeah. That's not gonna happen forever. I think by next year or the year after, that'll be done, and they'll just be like Microsoft and Apple will just be built in or something close enough to that or OpenAI will just be big enough. But, like, I'm not paying for all these AI things.

Aaron

00:25:55 – 00:25:57

I'm not paying for all these things.

Ian

00:25:57 – 00:26:11

But whatever. Right now, I'm paying for several different AI things. The thing that got me actually off of Claude, because I kinda balance between open AI and Claude, is the open AI Mac app is actually super, super good.

Aaron

00:26:11 – 00:26:11

It's great.

Ian

00:26:11 – 00:26:25

And so I've been using that. Yep. And that's that's kind of kept me more in the OpenAI land. And then also the o one, has also then kinda kept me more in that. But I don't know if you saw the deep seek thing.

Ian

00:26:25 – 00:26:38

I mean, we've turned this into AI podcast, but, like, that seems incredible, and there's a lot of stuff going on there. So, yeah, this AI stuff, there's, like, zero, literally zero sort of lock in mode.

Aaron

00:26:38 – 00:26:39

Oh, no freaking way.

Ian

00:26:39 – 00:26:52

Just like No way. Every random company is gonna have the next best AI thing, and then it's just gonna be included with I mean, like, we're very close to, I think, it's just being included in your OS, you know, within a year or two, which is

Aaron

00:26:52 – 00:27:01

Especially with DeepSeek being free and open source. Right. I mean, that the prices are just being driven to zero.

Ian

00:27:01 – 00:27:06

Yeah. It is shit like, a Chinese thing, which is a little weird because you're, like, banning TikTok, but then here's

Aaron

00:27:06 – 00:27:07

I know.

Ian

00:27:07 – 00:27:08

Over the Chinese

Aaron

00:27:08 – 00:27:10

over the island. From the same place.

Ian

00:27:10 – 00:27:17

Yeah. No. That's all weird, but that stuff aside, it's just gonna be them all leapfrogging each other. Right? Like, constantly, whatever.

Ian

00:27:17 – 00:27:27

Next one, next one, next one. We all benefit, and that's straight. We do. Yeah. I think I don't really get the whole I I still feel like ultimately, like, it's just gonna be a tool.

Ian

00:27:27 – 00:27:53

I do think it's I think I'm a little more on the side of, like, I do think you'll be able to tell it to build you an app in the sense of, like, I mean, every crud app you've ever built is, like, 95% the same thing, you know? And so, like, if you're building some back office thing and just like, hey. Build me a new customer contact manager that sucks in emails from here and puts them over here. Like, I think you'd probably be able to do that at some point. Not yet.

Ian

00:27:53 – 00:28:09

I don't think you can do it, but Mhmm. It'll be possible. That's different, though, than, like, a consumer product. I still think in the consumer product, you're gonna have just, just a lot of other factors in there, and you're still gonna need the humans kinda figuring out what's up. I still think yeah.

Ian

00:28:09 – 00:28:27

The you need the human developers, I think, to big picture. Right now, you definitely need the human developers. Mhmm. And I think for a long time, you're gonna still need the human developers. Maybe not forever, but, you know, I think I'll be retired before you don't need a human for the most part or where you can replace a large percentage of the humans.

Ian

00:28:28 – 00:28:37

I do think that's probably coming because, like, a lot of the stuff is sort of, you know, does the code work? I mean, it's my style code. Right? Does the code work or not? Like, if Mhmm.

Ian

00:28:37 – 00:28:47

We don't really care if the code's beautiful. Like, does the code work? It's testable blah blah blah. And, you know, there's no style points because the code is all behind the scenes. So the humans give it style.

Ian

00:28:47 – 00:28:51

Breaks my heart. Right? I know. I love I love style points. AI?

Ian

00:28:51 – 00:28:58

Like, what you just said. Right? Like, you gave it some input. You know what the output's supposed to be. Does it give you the right output?

Ian

00:28:58 – 00:29:03

And it does or it doesn't. Right? So but whatever. There's complicated systems. There's a lot of stuff.

Ian

00:29:04 – 00:29:15

Yeah. I don't know. I mean, it's and it depends what you hook it up to. I mean, right now, the thing about the existential stuff I don't totally get is, like, right now, I can hook up a computer to a nuclear weapon. I mean, I'm sure there's tons of computers hooked up to nuclear weapons already.

Ian

00:29:15 – 00:29:15

Right?

Aaron

00:29:15 – 00:29:16

Where's where's this going?

Ian

00:29:17 – 00:29:29

Yeah. Like, I'm just saying, like, in terms of existential threats, like, there's already those already exist. Computers are already in the loop. If the humans decide to say, hey. We're gonna let the AI decide when to shoot a nuclear weapon.

Ian

00:29:29 – 00:29:37

It's probably a bad idea. I probably wouldn't do that. But we are in control of that, so, hopefully, people won't do those kind of things.

Aaron

00:29:37 – 00:29:40

That I know nothing about. I'm more worried about my livelihood. Like, my job.

Ian

00:29:40 – 00:29:44

I thought you meant the big existential. You just need a job. Okay.

Aaron

00:29:44 – 00:29:47

No. The big existential. We're all toast. It's gonna yeah. We're done.

Aaron

00:29:47 – 00:29:51

But until then, I'd like to have a job or at least a way to make money.

Ian

00:29:52 – 00:30:04

Yeah. I mean, I think it just don't you think it just moves to the next phase where, like, I don't know. In the past, the new technology's always made more jobs, like, a % of the time. So it's just like, yes. Are they gonna be exactly the same jobs?

Ian

00:30:04 – 00:30:24

No. So you might need different types of jobs. But I still think that it will be additive and it'll free people up from writing who the frick, I know there's weirdos out there and you're probably listening to some of you who'd like to write, like, recursive loops, and that's your fun thing to do, but it's not fun. Nobody likes doing it. There's tons of bugs in there.

Ian

00:30:24 – 00:30:25

There's tons

Aaron

00:30:25 – 00:30:25

of things.

Ian

00:30:25 – 00:30:26

It's hard.

Aaron

00:30:27 – 00:30:28

And Kinda awesome.

Ian

00:30:28 – 00:30:33

They're good. It's kinda awesome, but you just had Chat Chibi Tea do it all for you. Right? Because it's Some of it. Yeah.

Ian

00:30:33 – 00:30:43

Much better. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's gonna be better at it because that's not a thing that if humans necessarily brain is not good at, the computer's gonna be much better at it and just let the computer do it. So I

Aaron

00:30:43 – 00:30:58

just need to I think in the next two to five years Mhmm. I do think this industry is going to be completely different, and I need to make sure that I come out on top. That's what I'm after.

Ian

00:30:59 – 00:31:01

That's that's what I like where we're going with this.

Aaron

00:31:01 – 00:31:02

That is what I'm after. That's all that

Ian

00:31:02 – 00:31:07

I'm after. Good, baby. Greed is good. It's all on Wall Street. We gotta get you locked up.

Aaron

00:31:07 – 00:31:11

I need I see the wave is coming. Yeah. The way the wave is here.

Ian

00:31:12 – 00:31:12

Mhmm.

Aaron

00:31:12 – 00:31:30

I don't wanna be I don't wanna be, I don't know what a good analogy is, hanging on to laserdisc when DVD's on the way. Right? I wanna see it coming, prepare myself, and adapt to it such that I come out on top. That's what I need to do. That's what I'm trying to do.

Aaron

00:31:30 – 00:31:42

So I'm trying to figure out how do I use these tools so that, I am more powerful, and I'm not, like, one of the ones that is eliminated because someone else is more powerful.

Ian

00:31:43 – 00:31:44

Get laid off again? No. I don't wanna get laid

Aaron

00:31:44 – 00:32:04

off again. And so I'm trying to figure out how do I how do I use these tools to level up? And then what is, like if if the economy is fundamentally gonna change, which I don't know, I kinda think it will, at least in our little niche, I think it will. What do I do? Like, what's coming next?

Aaron

00:32:04 – 00:32:10

Where's the next value? And how do I how do I get ahead of that? You know?

Ian

00:32:10 – 00:32:24

Yeah. Well, but in a sense, you've already made that switch, but you just think of yourself as old you, but you're new you. Like, old you is a software developer at a company. Yeah. New, you is a content creator.

Ian

00:32:24 – 00:32:43

So like you're not wrong. Yeah. So I think, and will people have more time for entertainment possibly? Will people need more information about the new types of jobs or the new expectations? Like maybe, you know, if you're a software developer at a company in five years, you have a team of AI developers.

Ian

00:32:43 – 00:32:57

If you're in some kind of big board company, you're cranking out widgets. Right? Like, so you have different skill set needs, which maybe you aren't totally prepared for, which might be an opportunity. Right? You have those kind of you're already there on the other side.

Aaron

00:32:57 – 00:32:58

You might be right.

Ian

00:32:58 – 00:32:59

Yeah. There you go.

Aaron

00:33:00 – 00:33:08

I don't know what the opposite of hoisted by my own petard is, but that that sounds like this. I was buoyed by my own petard. Yeah.

Ian

00:33:08 – 00:33:09

Thing to stress about.

Aaron

00:33:09 – 00:33:11

That's great. I love not stressing.

Ian

00:33:11 – 00:33:45

I do think for people who haven't converted to, the content economy yet, you know, I always think it would you could start today on doing the things that make a human in the middle of the process useful, which I always these are the type of people I've always hired because we're small, and I don't want somebody who literally can only code and has no useful skills beyond that. And so now you just need to think of yourself more like that. Like, can you get into the project management side of things? Can you get into the management side of things? Can you get into the product development side of things in terms of, like, feature decisions and things like that?

Ian

00:33:45 – 00:34:11

Like, can you get into support? All these things that, like, on some level, like, AI will do some of it, but they'll still be humans, you know, in the reasonable future. And you need to be aware of that because now you can be the person who's technical, but also does product stuff in some capacity. That's super useful. First, the person who only wants to work on this couple classes that they're responsible for in the big app and

Aaron

00:34:11 – 00:34:42

Yeah. I think I think pure programming I think the middle is gonna get eaten out pretty like, it's just gonna be totally gone. So what's gonna remain is seniors that are orchestrating some sort of, like, AI or whatever. And the seniors are responsible for, like, code quality and architecture and all of that. But everything else is just gonna get totally carved away.

Aaron

00:34:42 – 00:34:56

And so I think being a pure programmer that is not already, you know, one of these 10 x people, I think that that's gonna be toast. So, yeah, I think cross skills are gonna be pretty important.

Ian

00:34:57 – 00:35:33

I do think there's this also there could be this in between phase to depend on how long things take and how sophisticated the tools get and stuff. Like, I think there's a lot of, for example, like, people who outsource overseas or things like that. Like, you know, there's there's various challenges with that of, like, communication challenges, time zone challenges, all this stuff. And if that's like a miller road developer overseas with all these challenges, like, maybe now that's just replaced by an AI either directly, either some, like, AI agent or there's just like your team is faster now. Right?

Ian

00:35:33 – 00:35:46

Like every developer is twice as fast. Yes. Because they have these tools. So I don't, we don't even need those outsourced developers anymore. So like, there's some of that kind of stuff too that I think will come in potentially a bit.

Ian

00:35:46 – 00:36:04

But then again, the world needs more software. Like, there's not gonna be less software. There's gonna be more electronic things. There's gonna need to be more software in those things. So you're all you're, like so is it one of those things too where, like, the technology is rising to meet the demand that is actually not possible to be met by humans alone anymore?

Ian

00:36:04 – 00:36:31

That we are restrained, by the human capacity of just quantity of programmers and We need more and with different skill sets, right? Because like yeah, we don't need maybe we don't need a million react developers, right? Which is what the things are churning out But maybe we need a bunch of embedded systems developers, which are not Mhmm. So much fun, right, to go learn because you don't wanna learn assembly or c or whatever, but that's what the world needs. And

Aaron

00:36:31 – 00:36:36

so Yep. That that whole bunch of those. That whole squishy metal is gonna be gone Yeah. I think.

Ian

00:36:37 – 00:36:41

It could be. I think I'll figure out how to differentiate yourself. Just like ever, just like always.

Aaron

00:36:41 – 00:36:41

Just like always.

Ian

00:36:41 – 00:36:47

It's always been kinda true, but it could be a little more could be a little more pressure there.

Aaron

00:36:47 – 00:36:51

Yep. I think so. Brave new world.

Ian

00:36:51 – 00:36:57

Yeah. Like, may is this like when they invented the printing press? Do you think it was like this? I do kinda feel like it is

Aaron

00:36:57 – 00:37:15

when they invented maybe the Internet or something like that. I mean, I missed that one by a little bit, but I do feel I really do like, I didn't feel this way about crypto at all. I was like, guys, this is stupid. This is not the next iteration of the web. This is not web three.

Ian

00:37:15 – 00:37:15

Right.

Aaron

00:37:15 – 00:37:24

I do feel like AI is. I feel like it is the next iteration. It's the next, like, great leap from, you know, no Internet to Internet. I feel like this is the same.

Ian

00:37:25 – 00:37:35

Yeah. Like, twenty years from now, there'll be some form of AI thing in everything. Even if it's just doing a very simple one, it's in your refrigerator. Right? Yep.

Ian

00:37:35 – 00:37:46

And it's, like, doing some simple thing, checking temperature, whatever it's doing. Right? But it's got some task it does, and that's all. And so, obviously, it'll be in everybody's phone and all that stuff.

Aaron

00:37:46 – 00:37:51

Twenty years from now, I will have a humanoid robot in my house doing so.

Ian

00:37:51 – 00:37:55

Have a man dressed up like a humanoid robot walking around your house.

Aaron

00:37:56 – 00:37:57

That would be worse.

Ian

00:37:59 – 00:38:05

You think I I guess we probably will. Maybe. I don't know. I'm just dubious on the usefulness of that. Maybe it's too slow.

Aaron

00:38:05 – 00:38:18

Are you kidding? I mean, it's useful. Will. It's it is incredibly useful. Imagine never doing dishes again, never doing laundry again, never fixing a a faucet.

Aaron

00:38:18 – 00:38:29

Like, hey. There's can you go under the house and look? I heard a noise going down and see if there's a raccoon down there. Like, yeah. Do it at do it at two in the morning.

Aaron

00:38:29 – 00:38:35

Like, do go out in the garage and start fixing stuff all night because you don't need sleep. Yes. It's totally gonna be useful.

Ian

00:38:35 – 00:38:43

What do you think about, like what but I guess I'm not saying that I don't want a robot. I'm saying, is a humanoid robot the ideal form factor

Aaron

00:38:45 – 00:38:46

possibly? House? Yes.

Ian

00:38:46 – 00:38:47

You think so?

Aaron

00:38:47 – 00:38:50

For for the home, it is. For industry, nah.

Ian

00:38:50 – 00:38:53

Yeah. For industries, they already have robots. That dude

Aaron

00:38:53 – 00:39:17

I think the only thing that could be better than humanoid for the home is wield, but with still with arms. I don't think it needs to walk. Right. But having having hands that are shaped like mine to manipulate all of the things in the house that are prepared for human hands, I think, is pretty important. Like, it doesn't need I feel like walking is kinda hard.

Aaron

00:39:17 – 00:39:25

I'm good at it, but I feel like walking is kinda hard. And so maybe they put wheels on it. I I don't know. I don't care. But they're all doing they're all doing walkers.

Aaron

00:39:25 – 00:39:27

So it's like maybe they've already cracked it.

Ian

00:39:27 – 00:39:40

I guess. But then we've been seeing those videos for a very long time, and we haven't seen very much shipping products that you know, the dogs are sort of in use by some police departments and stuff, but it doesn't seem like they're everywhere. I don't know.

Aaron

00:39:40 – 00:39:53

I think figure has deployed humanoids in a BMW factory, and it's act they're they're actually doing tasks. I think they're pretty right down the middle. You know, it's a controlled environment. It's a Right. Assembly line.

Aaron

00:39:54 – 00:40:05

But the humanoids are are in there picking up panels and taking them over to be bolted on. I don't know how you make a car. What what do I know about cars? But I think they're doing something like that. So and I think it's figure.

Aaron

00:40:06 – 00:40:12

You know, there are several of these that are building humanoids. Yeah. I haven't heard about that. Is is figures. Okay.

Aaron

00:40:12 – 00:40:14

So, yeah, I think it's coming.

Ian

00:40:14 – 00:40:23

I don't know. You know, the vision stuff, it's like Tesla's been recording everybody's car drives for fifteen years now or whatever. Right? Mhmm. And we still don't really have the autopilot dialed in.

Ian

00:40:23 – 00:40:27

So I don't just don't know if it's quite that simple. I guess Well, I

Aaron

00:40:27 – 00:40:29

don't think it's simple at all. No. No. But I

Ian

00:40:29 – 00:40:39

just wonder, you know, a house has all different stuff. Everybody's house has different stuff. You have to figure out to really get truly understand it. That doesn't take, like, your kid's neck and ring it because think it's a jar it's opening. Right?

Ian

00:40:39 – 00:40:44

Like, there's a lot of stuff in there that has to be very precise with. So

Aaron

00:40:44 – 00:40:54

I think, the difference between jars and humans is probably figured out at this point. Probably. Probably. But, yes, I yes. Point taken.

Aaron

00:40:54 – 00:41:11

But I do think, I do think the rate at which all of this is accelerating, the rate itself is accelerating. So the math nerds can tell me if that's a first or second derivative. I can't say for sure. But I think the the rate of increase is increasing. And so Yeah.

Aaron

00:41:12 – 00:41:41

The last you know, for Tesla, maybe the first ten years, they didn't get any better on the self driving. In the last, you know, six months, they might have done more than they've done in the previous ten years. And so I think all of this stuff is getting better faster, including I've seen some of these, you know, humanoid demonstrations. And if we're to believe that, like, you know, these humanoid demonstrations are real, they're getting better fast.

Ian

00:41:41 – 00:41:42

If they're real. Yeah.

Aaron

00:41:42 – 00:41:54

If they're real. I think Tesla ones like, the Tesla bartenders were teleoperated. But I think all the figure stuff has been has been real. Like, it was slide by wire or anything like that.

Ian

00:41:54 – 00:41:57

Boston Dynamics. Yeah. You know, they're always, like, jumping and

Aaron

00:41:57 – 00:42:04

Yeah. Doing back flips. Whatever. I don't know what Boston Dynamics' end goal is, but they're always like, watch this robot do a flip.

Ian

00:42:05 – 00:42:07

Do you sell these Military? Yeah.

Aaron

00:42:07 – 00:42:07

What's going on here?

Ian

00:42:07 – 00:42:25

Like, gotta know. Yeah. I don't know. But the other thing is, like, so the big thing, like, Stratecory had a newsletter, which you should you should, subscribe to Stratecory, but, which is Ben Thompson's newsletter famous newsletter newsletter. Anyway, you know, it's like the AI is training the AI.

Ian

00:42:25 – 00:42:47

Right? So once you have the like AI training, the AI in theory, it can move much faster. Right. Whether that's actually true is yet to be proven, but like, it sounds reasonable. And I think the deep sea people claim to have done some aspects of that sort of thing, which is how they've gotten things cheaper and faster and smaller and whatever.

Ian

00:42:47 – 00:43:04

So, yeah. I do wonder though if like the are the LMs where we see all this action, like, is it applicable to vision stuff? I don't know. It's like they like, normally AI has vision stuff. So there is some aspect there, but it's not totally clear to me on if it's if it's as good as the text based or not.

Ian

00:43:04 – 00:43:23

Like, it seems to do okay the few times I've given it something visual, but I don't know. Again, that's a huge difference from a three d space where you're walking around and trying not to kill humans and cats and things and whatever. But, I mean, yeah, I would like a haven't you seen iRobot, though? Are you worried about the iRobot? What about your existential robot dread?

Ian

00:43:23 – 00:43:24

No?

Aaron

00:43:24 – 00:43:25

No. I don't worry about the iRobot.

Ian

00:43:26 – 00:43:27

You're okay?

Aaron

00:43:27 – 00:43:30

Yeah. Have you seen iRobot? Of course, I've seen iRobot. With Will Smith?

Ian

00:43:30 – 00:43:33

Will Smith, baby. Great movie. Smith. Alright.

Aaron

00:43:33 – 00:43:34

Classic cinema. Of course, I've seen that.

Ian

00:43:34 – 00:43:35

I thought you've seen that.

Aaron

00:43:35 – 00:43:37

That's right up my alley.

Ian

00:43:37 – 00:43:39

It is right up your alley. So yes. I've also seen

Aaron

00:43:40 – 00:43:43

I've also seen, Frank and robot, robot and Frank.

Ian

00:43:44 – 00:43:45

I have not seen that. I don't know.

Aaron

00:43:45 – 00:43:45

Oh, man.

Ian

00:43:45 – 00:43:46

I never even heard of that.

Aaron

00:43:46 – 00:43:55

There's a specific genre of media, that I love, and it's robots learning how to love. And so robot and Frank

Ian

00:43:55 – 00:43:58

that one? Oh, okay. The 2020

Aaron

00:43:58 – 00:43:59

or 2012

Ian

00:43:59 – 00:44:00

or whatever.

Aaron

00:44:00 – 00:44:02

Oh, yeah. Chappy movie.

Ian

00:44:02 – 00:44:07

No. No. It's, like, called it's, like, Bradford or something like that. I don't know. Yeah.

Ian

00:44:07 – 00:44:07

It made me cry.

Aaron

00:44:07 – 00:44:08

I know.

Ian

00:44:08 – 00:44:10

Because I cry why did they learn to learn? They should

Aaron

00:44:10 – 00:44:19

watch that. I love that. It is 2012 with, Frank Langella. Do you know who that is? No.

Aaron

00:44:19 – 00:44:27

Super old guy. Yeah. What's he known for? What's he most known for? Oh, Frost and Nixon?

Aaron

00:44:28 – 00:44:29

Did you see that movie in 02/2008?

Ian

00:44:29 – 00:44:30

No. I didn't. I didn't see

Aaron

00:44:30 – 00:44:31

that movie.

Ian

00:44:31 – 00:44:33

Oh, this guy. Oh, yeah. I know this guy. This guy You

Aaron

00:44:33 – 00:44:44

know this guy. Everybody knows this guy. He's been around. So this guy this old guy gets a a robot helper, and they go on hijinks together, and he learns to love. It's so good.

Aaron

00:44:44 – 00:44:46

So that's what it's gonna be like.

Ian

00:44:46 – 00:44:50

How have I not seen any of this guy's movies? But I clearly know who this guy is.

Aaron

00:44:50 – 00:44:51

Everybody knows who this guy is.

Ian

00:44:51 – 00:44:52

A famous guy.

Aaron

00:44:52 – 00:44:53

Guy is. Very famous guy.

Ian

00:44:53 – 00:45:00

Robot and Frank. Are you, what about oh, he's in he's in Wall Street. Your version of Wall Street. Money versus Money versus Money versus Money versus Sleeps.

Aaron

00:45:00 – 00:45:03

Sleeps the good version with Shia Labeouf.

Ian

00:45:04 – 00:45:06

Are you excited about the new Superman?

Aaron

00:45:06 – 00:45:16

No. This is the first I'm hearing that there is a new Superman. So my my response must be no Oh. Because I I have a null a null reaction to it.

Ian

00:45:16 – 00:45:18

Go watch the trailer. The guy There's

Aaron

00:45:18 – 00:45:25

a new Superman? Are we just doing the same movies over and over forever until the heat death of the universe?

Ian

00:45:25 – 00:45:26

Guardians of the galaxy.

Aaron

00:45:27 – 00:45:33

Oh, no. Not really. I watched part of one on a plane, and I was like, this is corny. Dude, this is corny. Corny.

Ian

00:45:34 – 00:45:37

Guardians of the galaxy. Why are we doing we just

Aaron

00:45:37 – 00:45:38

did Superman.

Ian

00:45:38 – 00:45:45

No. We We've done it all. All those are unwatchable, the ones of the past, like, fifteen years. Unwatchable. What are we doing?

Ian

00:45:45 – 00:45:46

It's gotta be time

Aaron

00:45:46 – 00:45:53

for another Spider Man. We haven't had one in six months. Listen. You're Let's start a new franchise. Let's start a brand new franchise of Spider Man again.

Ian

00:45:53 – 00:45:58

James Gunn's Superman is gonna be right up your alley. Right up your alley. I'm telling you.

Aaron

00:45:59 – 00:46:01

I don't know who James Gunn is.

Ian

00:46:01 – 00:46:02

He's the best. He's the best.

Aaron

00:46:02 – 00:46:06

Who is Superman? I don't even know who Superman is. Clark. Who is this? No.

Aaron

00:46:06 – 00:46:10

No. No. I know the character who's playing Superman in this video. I don't know who

Ian

00:46:10 – 00:46:15

he likes this guy. I think he's like a up and coming kind of guy. He's been in some stuff, but I don't know him either. But that's Why do I want

Aaron

00:46:16 – 00:46:18

why do I want why do I want another Superman?

Ian

00:46:18 – 00:46:18

God. No.

Aaron

00:46:18 – 00:46:22

Super We've done Superman. Superman. Do we have

Ian

00:46:22 – 00:46:29

we not had Superman and Superman two are, like, the best superhero movies still. All these other superhero movies heroes have been made. Those two are the best.

Aaron

00:46:29 – 00:46:33

Have we not had a new idea in the past fifty years?

Ian

00:46:34 – 00:46:39

Listen to listen to me. Kneel before Zod. Okay? Kneel before Zod. This means nothing

Aaron

00:46:39 – 00:46:42

to me.

Ian

00:46:42 – 00:46:43

We haven't had a new idea, but

Aaron

00:46:43 – 00:46:44

I don't know what that means.

Ian

00:46:44 – 00:46:48

There's people out there right now yelling at their speaker. They're so excited. They

Aaron

00:46:48 – 00:46:51

always do. They think I they think I watched before Zod.

Ian

00:46:51 – 00:46:52

You know

Aaron

00:46:52 – 00:46:55

what I just mean? Past and furious and interstellar. That's all I want.

Ian

00:46:55 – 00:47:03

No. I don't mean about that. They're just yelling that I said Neil before Zod. They're very excited about Neil before Zod because they have an emotional attachment to it like I do. I walk around my house.

Ian

00:47:03 – 00:47:09

I say it to my kids all the time. They don't even know what it means. Do they ever They have no idea. I can't they watched the movie when they were little. Nobody was willing to rewatch it with me.

Ian

00:47:10 – 00:47:12

Correct. They're like, yeah. Yeah. That Neil before his eyes. Whatever.

Aaron

00:47:12 – 00:47:15

Sure. Sure, big guy. Can I have $20?

Ian

00:47:15 – 00:47:15

Exactly.

Aaron

00:47:18 – 00:47:22

I'm so serious about just remaking movies over and over and over. Why are we doing this?

Ian

00:47:22 – 00:47:46

Because Because that's the only movies that people go to the movie theater to see is superhero movies. Nobody will go for a normal movie. They just won't go. I have to say it's sort of insane now. I thought when I, we redid our basement a few years back, Not like it was already finished, but like we made like a TV playstation kind of room and I got like a 65 inches blasting TV and this thing is insane It's huge.

Ian

00:47:46 – 00:47:49

And I was in best buy a couple weeks ago.

Aaron

00:47:49 – 00:47:51

There's just a nickel now.

Ian

00:47:51 – 00:47:55

Oh, yeah. First of all, that, but also there's a hundred inch total.

Aaron

00:47:55 – 00:47:56

Oh my word. It's

Ian

00:47:56 – 00:48:04

a box on a pallet. It's got its own pallet. Because like, I don't know how you get this thing whole. Why do you pick this thing up? It's way bigger than a truck bed.

Ian

00:48:05 – 00:48:14

I guess I don't know why it's in the store because they must have to deliver it on a big, like, you know, commercial truck, a hundred inch television. And I was just like, this is normal people.

Aaron

00:48:14 – 00:48:16

This is too far. This is too far.

Ian

00:48:16 – 00:48:22

Everybody told me the price of eggs and whatever. Well, people are just buying a hundred inch television. There's

Aaron

00:48:22 – 00:48:23

two Americas

Ian

00:48:23 – 00:48:26

Apartments. Apartment. They're like, hey.

Aaron

00:48:26 – 00:48:26

Man.

Ian

00:48:26 – 00:48:31

Room. I got a 13 foot wall. I got a hundred inch television. It's crazy.

Aaron

00:48:32 – 00:48:56

I I drive into the apartment. You know, I work in an apartment. I drive into the apartment, and I see in in the parking garage, I see cars that cost a hundred thousand dollars. And I'm driving in my twenty sixteen four Runner, and I'm like, what the hell am I doing wrong? These guys are having hundred thousand dollar Mercedes SUVs sitting in the parking garage at the apartment.

Aaron

00:48:56 – 00:48:58

I just I don't understand the economy. That's that's what it

Ian

00:48:58 – 00:48:59

comes down to. Crazy.

Aaron

00:48:59 – 00:49:00

I don't I

Ian

00:49:00 – 00:49:13

have that same experience when I go to my parents, which my parents had moved out of the house. They moved into nice condo complex kind of thing. And it's like, you know, it's like old people and young people mostly with some middle ground. And it's like, yeah. It's like every car.

Ian

00:49:13 – 00:49:14

Every car is new.

Aaron

00:49:14 – 00:49:14

A % of

Ian

00:49:14 – 00:49:22

cars are new. Every car is new. And, you know, and 50% of them are, you know, over $70,000 or whatever. It's, like, being up 150%

Aaron

00:49:22 – 00:49:26

of junk. Trucks. Okay. They're $80,000 Right. For a truck.

Ian

00:49:26 – 00:49:27

Every single one What are

Aaron

00:49:27 – 00:49:27

we doing?

Ian

00:49:27 – 00:49:29

What is going on? This whole thing is all

Aaron

00:49:29 – 00:49:30

What is going on?

Ian

00:49:31 – 00:49:38

Anyway, I don't have a hundred inch TV yet. I haven't reached that level someday. No. I wanna get to hundred inch TV level, but not yet. Man.

Ian

00:49:38 – 00:49:38

Not there yet.

Aaron

00:49:40 – 00:49:46

Yeah. Anyway, we gotta make we gotta make new movies. Movies, I'm tired. Except Fast and Furious, you can make those over and over again.

Ian

00:49:46 – 00:49:48

That's fine. Part of the problem?

Aaron

00:49:48 – 00:49:52

No. No. I'm part of the solution. Those are good movies, but come on. No more Superman.

Aaron

00:49:52 – 00:49:53

No more Spider Man.

Ian

00:49:54 – 00:50:01

Nobody even watch movies. You can't get people to watch them. They won't even watch them at home, much less go to the movie theater. So I don't know where movies are dying, man. There's, like, a movie star.

Ian

00:50:02 – 00:50:07

That's sad. They're gone. They're gonna be gone. In twenty years, they're gonna have AI robots in your house, but you're not gonna have any movies.

Aaron

00:50:08 – 00:50:09

When we're just gonna sit there, what are we gonna do?

Ian

00:50:09 – 00:50:10

You're not gonna have to talk

Aaron

00:50:11 – 00:50:12

to each other. Can you

Ian

00:50:12 – 00:50:17

imagine? Nobody watches TV. Nobody watches movies. Mhmm. They watch YouTube.

Ian

00:50:17 – 00:50:17

I guess YouTube.

Aaron

00:50:17 – 00:50:20

They watch YouTube. They watch TikTok. Yeah. That's insane.

Ian

00:50:20 – 00:50:26

I was just yelling at my middle kid the other day about this. I was like, there's you guys have no shared culture. There's zero shared

Aaron

00:50:26 – 00:50:27

culture I know.

Ian

00:50:27 – 00:50:43

In, like, that generation. They can't talk about anything because they don't have any language to talk about, Seinfeld or anything. I saw this comedian. I came up because I was explaining to him silent live, which he had never heard of and didn't know what it was. And, like, it's like there's no shared culture.

Ian

00:50:43 – 00:50:45

It's crazy. It seems very bad.

Aaron

00:50:45 – 00:50:47

It does seem very bad. That is that is

Ian

00:50:47 – 00:50:48

one shared culture.

Aaron

00:50:48 – 00:51:06

That is one downside of many of the, super smart algorithm is that nobody's watching the same thing. Nobody Man, we when when I was coming up, it was just e bombs world. And we all watched the videos on e bombs world. I don't know.

Ian

00:51:06 – 00:51:06

You know,

Aaron

00:51:06 – 00:51:24

I am retired, fires the missiles. Like, we would walk around the halls saying all the same, like, 10 lines because it's like we all watched this video. Important. We all just watched home star runner, the new release on whatever that came out Tuesday afternoons or whatever. And we'd come to school the next day, and we'd be talking about the new home star video.

Aaron

00:51:24 – 00:51:30

Yeah. And it was like, that was fun. But, yeah, now they're all watching individualized the kids.

Ian

00:51:30 – 00:51:31

The kids.

Aaron

00:51:31 – 00:51:33

I feel like Ian screaming at the clouds.

Ian

00:51:33 – 00:51:40

You're old man now. You're old man. Forget it. It's all the same. Once your mid thirties is all the same, it can be 70, which is 25.

Ian

00:51:40 – 00:51:41

It doesn't matter. It's all It's

Aaron

00:51:41 – 00:51:46

all the same. I'm going to Amsterdam.

Ian

00:51:46 – 00:51:48

Right. That is this week. Right?

Aaron

00:51:48 – 00:51:50

I leave on Saturday or Sunday. I don't really know.

Ian

00:51:50 – 00:51:53

Oh, I'm not gonna have a show next week.

Aaron

00:51:53 – 00:52:13

I know. So I, I speak on the second day, which I think is I think this cover starts on Monday. I know very little about what's happening, but I think it I think it starts on Monday. I know that I am the second day, which will be, I think, second day afternoon. So I think it's, like, 07:30AM.

Ian

00:52:13 – 00:52:15

Schedules up. Schedules up.

Aaron

00:52:15 – 00:52:16

Schedules up. Schedules up.

Ian

00:52:16 – 00:52:17

Let's see. I'm

Aaron

00:52:17 – 00:52:18

post lunch. Second day.

Ian

00:52:19 – 00:52:20

Lunch. Right after lunch.

Aaron

00:52:20 – 00:52:23

Oh, sleepy spot. I got a sleepy spot.

Ian

00:52:24 – 00:52:25

Day after lunch.

Aaron

00:52:25 – 00:52:25

Yeah.

Ian

00:52:25 – 00:52:26

I buried

Aaron

00:52:26 – 00:52:31

you. I know. Redacted. Hopefully hopefully, the Europeans eat lighter than the Americans.

Ian

00:52:31 – 00:52:31

Because if

Aaron

00:52:31 – 00:52:35

I'm second day in a in a US conference after lunch, everybody's asleep.

Ian

00:52:35 – 00:52:49

And, hopefully, they don't have a lot of, too much beverages the night before. Although you do have a lot of still you got heavy hitters in front of you, so I think I think you'd be okay. Yeah. But Jess Archer, opening day two with the Nightwatch one. So people are gonna wanna see see I think

Aaron

00:52:49 – 00:52:51

we'll be okay. Sure. I think we'll be

Ian

00:52:51 – 00:52:56

some big brand name stuff coming. So I think, yeah, I think I think you'd be alright.

Aaron

00:52:56 – 00:53:06

So no show next week, but you can maybe I still don't know if there's a live stream. You can maybe tune in to a live stream of the conference. I have no idea. I've asked. I haven't heard back.

Aaron

00:53:07 – 00:53:07

Ian

00:53:07 – 00:53:16

Maybe maybe I should do it. Maybe I should get a guest, though, so we could talk about what's going on. Maybe I'll do a guest show. Oh, that would be fun. Not the first the first show with the ads.

Aaron

00:53:16 – 00:53:17

I don't

Ian

00:53:17 – 00:53:19

know. I'll just do the ads. It's fun. You can

Aaron

00:53:19 – 00:53:24

do the ads. You're good at this. We could also do we could do a post Laracon show.

Ian

00:53:24 – 00:53:27

We could do that special edition on, like, Wednesday or something. Or

Aaron

00:53:28 – 00:53:31

Or I could, yeah, I could record Tuesday afternoon.

Ian

00:53:32 – 00:53:32

If you're not

Aaron

00:53:32 – 00:53:36

busy at the conference. Yeah. Yeah. In Amsterdam time.

Ian

00:53:36 – 00:53:37

Might be busy, though.

Aaron

00:53:37 – 00:53:41

That might be. That might be kinda fun, though. Here. You know?

Ian

00:53:41 – 00:53:50

Do a solo. I could get a guest. Or if you're available, we'll wait to see how your availability is. K. If you're available and you could squeeze out even, like, half an hour or something, we could jump in.

Ian

00:53:50 – 00:53:51

You give us the recap.

Aaron

00:53:51 – 00:53:56

If not Then I can get the live reaction from you about the new the new library. True.

Ian

00:53:56 – 00:54:00

I hope they stream it. Did they say if they are gonna have a stream or no?

Aaron

00:54:00 – 00:54:04

No. I've asked, and he was like, we'll let you know, wink face.

Ian

00:54:04 – 00:54:05

And I'm

Aaron

00:54:05 – 00:54:06

like, what does that mean?

Ian

00:54:06 – 00:54:13

Y'all let me know. Tell me. A a link to some kind of thing on GitHub or some slide or something. I will have

Aaron

00:54:13 – 00:54:15

I will have a full YouTube video

Ian

00:54:15 – 00:54:15

Okay.

Aaron

00:54:16 – 00:54:19

Ready ready to be released the moment I walk on stage.

Ian

00:54:19 – 00:54:24

Okay. So I will be able to know Yes. Be in the loop on what's going on even if there's You'll be able to see that. Yep. Okay.

Aaron

00:54:24 – 00:54:28

So we're getting there. We're getting really close.

Ian

00:54:28 – 00:54:28

Wow.

Aaron

00:54:29 – 00:54:30

Really close.

Ian

00:54:30 – 00:54:35

Feel you oh, yeah. Give us that update. So you were, you know, you were going backwards last week.

Aaron

00:54:35 – 00:54:36

I was going backwards.

Ian

00:54:36 – 00:54:38

Time before that. Now are we heading in the right direction?

Aaron

00:54:38 – 00:55:01

I think we're heading in the right direction now. Pieces are starting to come together. So I've been, you know, building these these, individual pieces of the loop, and now I'm starting to, like, connect them. And that just makes me feel like progress is happening a lot faster because I can, like, run the whole thing. And so that that's been very, very good.

Aaron

00:55:01 – 00:55:28

So we're getting we're getting close to a demoable state, which is basically all I need to get. Yeah. And so I'll try to record I'll try to record a demo today and send it to a few people to get, like, early, you know, feedback responses, that sort of thing. And then from there, I will probably finish out a few things, but I also need to, like, I need to, like, plan my talk. You know?

Aaron

00:55:28 – 00:55:47

It's not it's not gonna be terrible. Like, it's not like I'm writing a, you know, a talk where I just have to walk around the stage and opine on things. Right. Like, I have a lot of stuff to show, and that will guide the structure. But I still need to, like, I still need to put it down and figure out, like, where do I wanna go from here, what order I wanna do, like, that kind of stuff.

Aaron

00:55:47 – 00:56:06

So, I'm not super worried about the talk part. Just as long as I can land the demo, that'll be that's the structure of the talk. So, and then we got a few things we wanna do. We're gonna put up, you know, a landing page for this thing. It's a it's a free thing, but I still wanna, like, launch it super well.

Aaron

00:56:06 – 00:56:18

And so we're putting up a Yeah. Landing page, trying to do a video. Okay. Just capitalize on the momentum, of the, like, the reveal. So, yeah, I think I think we're gonna make it.

Aaron

00:56:18 – 00:56:19

It's been Also

Ian

00:56:19 – 00:56:25

a lot of like oh, just because they it looks like they chain had a change of heart, and it's thirty minute box. So at one point All

Aaron

00:56:25 – 00:56:26

over the place. Yeah.

Ian

00:56:26 – 00:56:29

It's gonna be twenty five minutes or something. I think it would have been Would

Aaron

00:56:29 – 00:56:43

have been tough. So, yeah, it's been it's it's it's been a lot. Lot lot of late nights, lot of, consternation, but I think it's gonna pay off.

Ian

00:56:43 – 00:56:47

I'm excited to see it. Very exciting. Stuff's launching. Stuff's happening.

Aaron

00:56:47 – 00:56:48

We love it when stuff launches.

Ian

00:56:49 – 00:56:51

Speak of that, rails course.

Aaron

00:56:51 – 00:56:56

Rails course. Rails course. We're doing a Rails course. We've done a Rails course. It's done.

Ian

00:56:56 – 00:56:57

It's in the game.

Aaron

00:56:57 – 00:57:18

It's done. So, yeah, we finally, got that, you know, trailer all edited up, got the website up and running. And so the videos are currently being edited right now. Mhmm. And so this is the first time this is the first time we've announced a course with it totally done, I mean, in terms of recording.

Aaron

00:57:18 – 00:57:40

And that feels a lot better. Way less pressure. So we have hired an editor to do this one. So we're trying to, you know, we're trying to leverage our time and leverage our skills, and so we're not gonna have Steve spend two or three weeks editing this when he could be doing other stuff. Okay.

Aaron

00:57:40 – 00:57:50

And so we're paying an editor to do this one. Steve is still exercising oversight. And the editor is not cheap, but it is good because now Steve can do other stuff.

Ian

00:57:50 – 00:57:51

The whole deal. Yeah.

Aaron

00:57:51 – 00:58:06

Yep. So that's good. And then, we will launch that probably, like, February with plenty plenty of time to spare. And so I don't know. It's it's exciting.

Aaron

00:58:06 – 00:58:27

It's very exciting to have, like, a guest course out there. My hunch is just from, like, a monetary perspective, it won't do as good as the other two. But this is like this is the experiment. I don't think it needs to do as well as the other two, but it needs to be profitable.

Ian

00:58:27 – 00:58:28

And I

Aaron

00:58:28 – 00:58:29

think it'll be profitable.

Ian

00:58:29 – 00:58:29

I think

Aaron

00:58:29 – 00:58:48

it will be. The the level is an open open question. But regardless, I think the course is very good, and I think it will be profitable. I just don't know to what extent or to what degree. And so, yeah, I'm I'm super happy with it.

Aaron

00:58:48 – 00:58:59

I'm super happy that we, like, had an idea for an experiment. We did all the work to, like, pull off the experiment, and now we get to see, was it worth it or not?

Ian

00:58:59 – 00:59:11

This is sort of the first, yeah, real experiment. The kind of course that year that's got more risk associated with it. And I don't think there's a sponsor. Right? Was there there wasn't a corporate sponsor to this one or was there?

Aaron

00:59:11 – 00:59:12

There are two.

Ian

00:59:12 – 00:59:13

Oh, well, there you go.

Aaron

00:59:13 – 00:59:19

Yeah. Chris Chris Oliver, big, big guy in the rails. He's a Jeffrey Way kind of the rails community.

Ian

00:59:19 – 00:59:20

Oh, okay.

Aaron

00:59:20 – 00:59:26

He has a, forge esque service, which Mhmm. Observe Laravel, take to rails, make a bunch of money.

Ian

00:59:26 – 00:59:26

There you go.

Aaron

00:59:26 – 00:59:38

He has a Forge esque service called Hatchbox, and he's in on it. And then the, predominant, error tracker over in the rails community is called Honeybadger, and they're in on it. We all

Ian

00:59:38 – 00:59:39

Oh, yeah.

Aaron

00:59:39 – 00:59:48

We all know Honey Badger. Yeah. So Hatchbox and Honey Badger have very generously stepped up to sponsor this. And I think I think it's gonna, yeah, I think it's gonna work out great for them

Ian

00:59:49 – 00:59:49

Yeah.

Aaron

00:59:49 – 01:00:19

Because it is, compared to the, some of the other courses, the sponsorship amount is is still healthy, but not, like, not out of reach for any either of these companies. And I think they'll get a lot of, like, a lot of good return out of it. Hopefully, a lot of people that are coming to, like, hey. I wanna learn some rails because I'm sick of, you know, the churn and burn in the other ecosystems. I wanna learn some rails, and you get immediately exposed to net new people.

Aaron

01:00:19 – 01:00:24

So that's that's the hope. But, yeah, we've got two two very relevant sponsors for this one.

Ian

01:00:24 – 01:00:30

That's pretty cool too because I feel like since you guys, your reach is probably not quite as deep in rails. It's like Mhmm. They can help kick off that initial

Aaron

01:00:30 – 01:00:31

For sure.

Ian

01:00:31 – 01:00:35

Side. Right? Yeah. And then, like, then those people they reach. Mhmm.

Ian

01:00:35 – 01:00:42

But they already know them, of course, but then they they can go to that next step. Well, those people tell their audience. Right? And then you still reach those people that don't know Honeybadger

Aaron

01:00:43 – 01:00:44

Yes. Totally.

Ian

01:00:44 – 01:00:45

The patch box. So

Aaron

01:00:45 – 01:00:53

Yeah. Yeah. That's really good. And Steven the the guy who did the course is named Steven. Steven's gonna go on, some rails podcasts in the next few weeks.

Aaron

01:00:53 – 01:01:09

And so, like, he's out there doing some of that too. Yep. And so there's a there's a lot of interesting stuff going on, whether or not this becomes a big, like, pillar of our business, guest courses. That's an open question, but Yeah. This is exciting.

Aaron

01:01:09 – 01:01:11

So which course is best if

Ian

01:01:11 – 01:01:16

you don't mind me asking? You can say no if you do mind me asking, but I'm wondering which one.

Aaron

01:01:16 – 01:01:18

Which one made the most money?

Ian

01:01:18 – 01:01:18

Yeah.

Aaron

01:01:18 – 01:01:19

Yeah. Yeah. Postgres.

Ian

01:01:19 – 01:01:20

Postgres?

Aaron

01:01:20 – 01:01:22

Yep. Interesting. Mhmm.

Ian

01:01:22 – 01:01:23

I think it makes sense.

Aaron

01:01:23 – 01:01:35

Yep. I think it makes sense. Yeah. I think, we need to do January has been slow. So the whole, like, roller coaster of owning a business is very real.

Aaron

01:01:35 – 01:01:39

You know, January is slow. It's like, oh, great. Everything's over.

Ian

01:01:39 – 01:01:43

We're going out of business. Alright. It's over. It's over. It's a good run.

Aaron

01:01:43 – 01:01:46

Yeah. Programmers aren't needed. The business is dead.

Ian

01:01:46 – 01:01:48

Yeah. Perfect. Yep.

Aaron

01:01:48 – 01:02:07

So that's been fun. Yeah. But yeah. So I think we need to do another flagship database course this year, which we will, and it's going to be MySQL probably closer to the end of the year. The intro to SQL course, I think we're gonna try something a little bit new and make it a little bit more interactive.

Aaron

01:02:09 – 01:02:15

So for intro to SQL, we might have a, you know, the video up top and then a pane down below

Ian

01:02:15 – 01:02:15

Pane.

Aaron

01:02:15 – 01:02:27

Where you can run you can run queries against what will probably end up being a SQLite database on CloudFlare or something. So everybody gets their own. And so it's a little bit more interactive. You can play

Ian

01:02:27 – 01:02:28

with it. In the browser?

Aaron

01:02:29 – 01:02:33

I think there is, like, a SQLite WASM or something like that.

Ian

01:02:33 – 01:02:36

Superhuman does and linear does. They're like a local

Aaron

01:02:36 – 01:02:43

SQLite database. Those I think those are limited, on size, but it might be enough. But there are some you're

Ian

01:02:43 – 01:02:44

doing might

Aaron

01:02:44 – 01:03:01

not be there. There are some well, that maybe not be may not be true. I was thinking there are some lessons that, require a lot of data, but I that may not be true for the intro to SQL course because we're not gonna be going super deep into, like Optimization. A billion rows, how do you index it well?

Ian

01:03:01 – 01:03:02

It's like Well, I don't

Aaron

01:03:02 – 01:03:03

know what a database is.

Ian

01:03:03 – 01:03:05

Have another course for that. Yes. Yes. Alright. So you

Aaron

01:03:05 – 01:03:07

may be right. We may be able to pull it off solely

Ian

01:03:07 – 01:03:08

pretty cool.

Aaron

01:03:08 – 01:03:10

In the browser. We don't have to be super cool.

Ian

01:03:11 – 01:03:15

Cost or whatever. And just just like Infrastructure. Headache. You know? You know?

Ian

01:03:15 – 01:03:19

There's gonna be problems and support. That's interesting.

Aaron

01:03:19 – 01:03:31

Yeah. I'll check to see what the state of SQLite in the browser is. And if we can ship surely, we can. We can ship, like, a SQLite file that has schema and data in it that they can play with. You know what I mean?

Ian

01:03:31 – 01:03:37

But, I mean, this is I know superhuman, like, all your email, everything. It's in, like Yeah. The SQLite database in the local browsers.

Aaron

01:03:37 – 01:03:39

In local storage, really?

Ian

01:03:39 – 01:03:47

Yeah. No. That's I don't know if it's literally all there. There's some syncing thing or whatever. There's, like, a heavy use of the in browser SQLite.

Ian

01:03:47 – 01:03:49

And I'm pretty sure linear is the same way.

Aaron

01:03:49 – 01:03:57

I know that I've known that that is possible, but I have never once looked into, like, how to do it and what the limitations are. Course to see. Like, maybe I should.

Ian

01:03:57 – 01:04:03

Be simple queries. You know? It's not gonna be, like, anything too crazy. So Yeah. Yeah.

Ian

01:04:03 – 01:04:03

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Ian

01:04:03 – 01:04:04

Yeah.

Aaron

01:04:04 – 01:04:04

That's a

Ian

01:04:04 – 01:04:05

good idea.

Aaron

01:04:05 – 01:04:28

But either way, I think this this will make this will make that course more compelling. And that's something I've like, we're trying to always, you know, outdo ourselves. And I think this is one way that we can, like, level up is, have, like, an interactive playground kind of thing. Kent C. Dodds does that on all of his courses, and people seem to really like it.

Aaron

01:04:29 – 01:04:48

Yeah. But we haven't yet done any of that. And I this goes back to last week's existential dread seems to be a theme here. This goes back to that in that I think pure pure education plays are going to become tougher. I don't think it's I don't think it's over, but I think it is tougher.

Aaron

01:04:48 – 01:05:06

And the more that we can say, like, yes. Here's some education, but also here's some practice. Like, the way that we can hopefully, sidestep the oncoming truck a little bit is by changing the platform, leveling up, adapting a little bit. And this is this is a step in that direction.

Ian

01:05:06 – 01:05:32

Yeah. Is this is this like I'm connecting to totally wild and separate thoughts, but like, oh, this AI conversation, how it's gonna take over everything and all that stuff. But at the same time, the, what you're saying right now makes me think of the, my first job on the internet, where I learned the program was for this startup that ended up being bought by Prentice hall, which is a textbook maker, which I didn't get any money. I had no options or anything like that. But I ended up working in this big thing.

Ian

01:05:32 – 01:05:44

And anyway, what we were building was like online course companion software, and then also this active books we called them, which was, like, textbooks with interactive elements. That's, like, just this it's, like, the same thing you're talking about.

Aaron

01:05:44 – 01:05:45

Same thing.

Ian

01:05:45 – 01:05:49

Here's a course with interactive Nothing ever happens. Right? It's the same thing. Yes. We're just still doing the same thing.

Ian

01:05:49 – 01:05:56

That was something years ago. Yep. So there is that vibe where, like, yes. Like, you're doing that. Yeah.

Ian

01:05:56 – 01:06:12

You couldn't run that database in your browser and run queries against it in 02/2001 or whatever. Right? But, like, so that's the evolution, but at the same time, there's still these scenes and things that recur and still need to happen. So, anyway, it's not all

Aaron

01:06:12 – 01:06:22

You know you know what? You know what we could also do? That we're definitely going to do now that I've had the idea. So, Steve Steve, listen up. I just had a great idea.

Aaron

01:06:23 – 01:06:37

We're gonna we gotta build in some sort of AI assistant to these this playground area because, we can give the AI assistant the schema, a sample of the data, what the correct query should be

Ian

01:06:38 – 01:06:38

Yeah.

Aaron

01:06:38 – 01:06:48

And what the user typed in and say, alright. Here's the prompt. Help the user get to show them where they went wrong. Help them get to the right answer. And so they can watch the video.

Aaron

01:06:48 – 01:06:54

They can practice. They can get help from the little thing. By the end of it, they'll know SQL, and I'll be a millionaire.

Ian

01:06:54 – 01:06:55

Really good. Yeah.

Aaron

01:06:55 – 01:06:56

That's good. Right?

Ian

01:06:56 – 01:07:04

Have this AI assistant that's, like, knows that knows what they're doing right now so you can have a prompt all set up. So it knows where they're going.

Aaron

01:07:04 – 01:07:10

Transcript of the video and be like, here's the video they're watching. Here's the schema. Here's the data. Here's what typed in. Here's what they should have typed in.

Aaron

01:07:10 – 01:07:12

Where did they go wrong?

Ian

01:07:12 – 01:07:13

Yeah. I like that.

Aaron

01:07:14 – 01:07:15

That's good.

Ian

01:07:15 – 01:07:22

That's good. That you start to get into, like, fast. It's already even Good. Ongoing fee of some sort or whatever. You know what?

Ian

01:07:22 – 01:07:48

I don't know if it'll be enough to justify it, but you're starting to get in that ballpark, right, of, like, something. You're also getting in the ballpark of, are you building courses or are you just building content on top of your course management software, which is really the thing you sell ultimately Yeah. Which is like because obviously the same concept would be useful in any course. Right? Like, here's a course and here's a AI agent.

Ian

01:07:48 – 01:08:03

That's all cool and lets you set it up so it can help the people with whatever it is you're learning dentistry or anything. Right? Like, that's a big nut to crack, but there is something sort of interesting there, especially maybe who is targeting good. At your I'm not gonna lie. Level This is pretty good.

Ian

01:08:04 – 01:08:08

Now we're going. Everything comes back to a sass. You gotta turn everything into a sass.

Aaron

01:08:08 – 01:08:14

Everything has to be a sass. That's right. You'll you'll never be happy until you have running a sass. That's right.

Ian

01:08:14 – 01:08:15

Yes. Exactly.

Aaron

01:08:16 – 01:08:17

This is pretty good.

Ian

01:08:17 – 01:08:21

Well, you know, it could be two things going. You know, it's like, I should make the platform better. You know?

Aaron

01:08:21 – 01:08:22

Right.

Ian

01:08:22 – 01:08:24

Think about it more and see how

Aaron

01:08:24 – 01:08:31

it's doing. There's definitely a world in which we end up spinning off the platform as some sort of offering because

Ian

01:08:32 – 01:08:32

Yeah. Something.

Aaron

01:08:32 – 01:08:33

I think

Ian

01:08:33 – 01:08:33

we've done a

Aaron

01:08:33 – 01:08:47

lot of interesting things there, in terms of video hosting and, the design is quite good and the back end. So that that's possible. That is definitely not on my mind right now. Priority. Yeah.

Aaron

01:08:47 – 01:08:48

I'm not, like, coding towards that.

Ian

01:08:49 – 01:08:52

Like, why are you putting this idea in his head? We got stuff to do.

Aaron

01:08:52 – 01:09:01

Steve Steve already paused the podcast and threw down his wired headphones and frustration. But, yeah, I think tell me.

Ian

01:09:02 – 01:09:12

We need JavaScript Aaron Francis has been a fun side adventure, but we need YouTube Aaron Francis. I feel like YouTube Aaron Francis, he's got a little he's got a little forgotten.

Aaron

01:09:12 – 01:09:15

Gotten a little he's gotten a little long in the tooth. I know. It's out. It's,

Ian

01:09:16 – 01:09:24

I think you said you're gonna do a hundred videos on YouTube, so you gotta was that when your New Year's thing said that was your estimate, what you were thinking for?

Aaron

01:09:25 – 01:09:28

Oh, that's a lot. That's a lot.

Ian

01:09:28 – 01:09:29

It's a lot of videos.

Aaron

01:09:29 – 01:09:40

Yeah. I know. So here's here's a here's a peek into my mental state. I get in this, like, like, I'm working on this on this library. Right?

Ian

01:09:40 – 01:09:40

Right.

Aaron

01:09:40 – 01:09:48

And I I have, unfortunately, settled on the strategy of the big reveal. Gotta do the big reveal.

Ian

01:09:49 – 01:09:50

You like a big reveal?

Aaron

01:09:50 – 01:10:03

I love a big reveal. Love to create a spectacle. The problem is, I can share very little of what I'm doing along the way, and that has put me down into, like, hunker down mode. Not great.

Ian

01:10:03 – 01:10:03

Yep.

Aaron

01:10:04 – 01:10:30

The other problem, well, the other reality about the way that I, typically have worked is, like, hyper maniacal focus on one thing for a while and then just, like, I'll put that down for me. And right now, it's the library, and it should be my life should be arranged such that I can do one thing, like, in the morning. Maybe make some videos in the morning, work on some library in the afternoon. This is just that.

Ian

01:10:30 – 01:10:32

I find that very hard. I I'm not good at that either.

Aaron

01:10:32 – 01:10:32

I'm not

Ian

01:10:32 – 01:10:34

good at that. Code brain

Aaron

01:10:34 – 01:10:34

Yes.

Ian

01:10:34 – 01:10:41

Me and my wife call code mode. You're in code mode, it's hard to be in other modes. I've I've It's hard

Aaron

01:10:41 – 01:10:42

to be in other modes.

Ian

01:10:42 – 01:10:48

I got all this code in my head, and I can't go write a blog post or make a video because the code

Aaron

01:10:48 – 01:10:49

And it's not great.

Ian

01:10:49 – 01:10:53

And I only have so much, you know, random access memory available.

Aaron

01:10:53 – 01:11:00

And And it's not great because, remember, January's been slow. You know, it would help with that. Day database videos on YouTube. That would help.

Ian

01:11:00 – 01:11:01

That would help.

Aaron

01:11:01 – 01:11:02

That would help a lot.

Ian

01:11:02 – 01:11:04

What the hell am I doing? A step in the correct direction

Aaron

01:11:04 – 01:11:05

Yes.

Ian

01:11:05 – 01:11:06

Presume.

Aaron

01:11:06 – 01:11:12

So once again, the battle is within. But I'm work we're getting there. We'll get there.

Ian

01:11:13 – 01:11:20

Is not totally within. It's like, I mean, you it would be different if you didn't have a date that you really had to hit. Right? Like That

Aaron

01:11:20 – 01:11:20

is true.

Ian

01:11:20 – 01:11:42

If you were just building a library, it's like, hey. I could push this library off another month because I should do some videos now because we need to keep on marketing, and I'll come back to the JavaScript thing, which will still be hard because of code mode, but whatever. Like, you could do it. But but you really can't do it right now because you have to hit the same. You're already you're going backwards in your completion percentage.

Ian

01:11:42 – 01:11:43

So there's all of

Aaron

01:11:43 – 01:11:47

the stuff that's on. Here's a great place to say hoisted by my own petard. There

Ian

01:11:47 – 01:11:48

we go.

Aaron

01:11:48 – 01:11:52

That's where I've been hoisted. Definitely. I've got a deadline by

Ian

01:11:52 – 01:11:52

your own petard.

Aaron

01:11:52 – 01:11:57

And I need to just finish it. And so I once again am hoisted.

Ian

01:11:57 – 01:12:01

But that deadline is, it's almost here. It's a couple days away.

Aaron

01:12:01 – 01:12:02

It is rapidly approaching.

Ian

01:12:03 – 01:12:04

Yeah. So that'll be nice.

Aaron

01:12:04 – 01:12:10

I do see the light at the end of the tunnel. I know Europeans love trains. So to borrow a little train metaphor, I see the light at the end of the tunnel. So

Ian

01:12:11 – 01:12:15

Yeah. We're getting there. Yeah. Okay. I want you to bear in Francis back, man.

Ian

01:12:15 – 01:12:16

I need He'll be back.

Aaron

01:12:16 – 01:12:17

He's not dead.

Ian

01:12:17 – 01:12:22

Alright. Good. Because I want hundred thousand subscriber Aaron Francis. That's what I want.

Aaron

01:12:22 – 01:12:24

That's what I want. I want plaque Aaron Francis.

Ian

01:12:24 – 01:12:31

I want a plaque Aaron Francis. How cool would that be? You could set it up. Let's have it set up in the background. There you can have it right there.

Aaron

01:12:31 – 01:12:35

I know. Beautiful. It would be. It's gonna happen. This is our year.

Ian

01:12:35 – 01:12:38

Alright. I like it. Alright. Well, do we got anything else?

Aaron

01:12:38 – 01:12:41

No. No sleepy in. You're out, man. You did it.

Ian

01:12:41 – 01:12:45

Yeah. I did it. We did it. We episode Couldn't even tell. Yeah.

Ian

01:12:45 – 01:12:55

I think I I told you, I took that shower, man. Shower. I was laying in bed with the heated thing. You know, you're still like, oh, it's heated. Like, it's nice in here, and I'm tired.

Ian

01:12:56 – 01:12:58

I'm frumpy from being tired.

Aaron

01:12:58 – 01:12:58

Yep.

Ian

01:12:58 – 01:13:04

I'm frumpy because I didn't sleep. Yep. Took the shower, cleansed. Mhmm. Ready to go.

Ian

01:13:04 – 01:13:07

Ready to hit it hard today. So I think I think we're good.

Aaron

01:13:07 – 01:13:08

A true professional.

Ian

01:13:08 – 01:13:09

Yeah. Exactly.

Aaron

01:13:09 – 01:13:10

Michael Jordan with the flu.

Ian

01:13:11 – 01:13:12

The show must go on.

Aaron

01:13:12 – 01:13:12

That's right.

Ian

01:13:12 – 01:13:27

Alright. Well, let's wrap it. Thanks, everybody. Everything you need is on mosttechnical.com. All the links to social media, all links to sponsorship, all the old episodes, mostly techno.com, and we will see you somehow or some way next week.

Ian

01:13:27 – 01:13:35

Might be a day or two late. We'll see if we can get Aaron in hooked in. Otherwise, I'll grab somebody. We'll do a special episode. One way or the other, at some point next week, we will be back.

Ian

01:13:36 – 01:13:37

See you later.

Aaron

01:13:37 – 01:13:37

See you.

The Big Reveal

Transcript

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